File view

Hey guys, I've been looking at XBMC to replace my WMC+Media Browser setup for a while now, and I've settled on Bello as my skin of choice. I have it pretty much set up now, but there is one thing that is annoying me that I can't seem to get around. If I, on the home menu, select Movies, it shows me a list selection of Add Videos and my own folders. But it shows all of my folders - Films, TV Shows, Web, and so on. Is it possible for me to just click Movies and have it instantly open my Films folder, not give any other option?

It's really annoying because my Films folder also shows up if I click TV Shows - what's the point of selecting TV Shows if it's going to show my films? I'm also never going to select the Add Videos option because I've already set all of my folders up.

Thanks for the quick reply, Kib. I removed my folders and started again, following the XBMC Frodo guide. I added my films folder, told XBMC it held movies, then sat back and let it go through everything which took a while. I did notice that the Add Files option had disappeared, but I assumed it did that so as not to be overloaded in scanning through all of my films and tv shows folders. I let it scan them all, and went back to the home menu and did a quick test by selecting Movies, and everything showed up properly. Great, I thought.

I went back to Videos, selected Files, and... the only option there is Films - Add Files is no longer there. I now can't add my tv show folders or whatever else. What to do now?

Edit - After some browsing, I found that the Add Videos option had been disabled in settings. This is what I find frustrating about XBMC, and which has held me back from swapping to it until now - seemingly random things like this. Why would the Add Videos option suddenly not be enabled? Very odd.

Okay, one last question - is there any way I can add my own category to the home screen? I have a folder called web & comedians, and it's just filled with things as various as concert videos, gametrailers specials, and obviously live comedian shows. I don't need a scraper to look through all of that, I can just leave it as a file view if need be. Can this be done?

Edit again - Oh, geeze. Here we go again. After adding my tv shows, I've now got multiple missing episodes. Adventure Time, for example, says it has only one episode, and for some reason it has picked season three's episode 10. What the hell? There is nothing different about Adventure Time's folder setup as opposed to any other, inside the main folder each season is labelled as -

Season 1
Season 2

- and so on. Inside that each episode is labelled as -

01 - It Came From The Nightosphere.mkv
02 - The Eyes.mkv

-and so on. Some have only one episode also, and others have nothing at all! So why is XBMC showing only one episode from one season? What the hell does it want? Like I said, frustrating.

have movies as such: Movie Name (Year)/Movie Name (Year).avi and make sure you check that movies are in separate sub folders when setting the type of the source.
For series: TV Show Name/Season XX/ SXXEXX.episode name.avi

Setup FileBot to output in this format, import your files in bulk and let it do the heavy lifting ^^

I don't have a problem with movies, I have them set up to the way TMDB likes them (and the same with tv shows for TTVDB), and they're structured as such -

Films > Riddick > Riddick (2013).mkv

I don't understand why I need to use Filebot to rename everything when they're all stored and named correctly anyway, in the manner the above scrapers (which I also use for Media Browser) specify, especially as I'm not convinced at this point whether I should move fully over to XBMC. I realise WMC is a dead end, Media Browser is not being updated any more and Media Browser Theatre is far from ready, but at least WMC and Media Browser works at the moment. XBMC on the other hand seems to need a lot more setup - I know there's a lot more options to configure as you like but with it seemingly changing options at will and the default skin, Confluence, suddenly darkening way too much when opening say, a sub-menu for God knows what reason, it's just getting more and more irritated and resigned to sticking with WMC and Media Browser yet again.

I don't want Filebot to rename everything if I decide to stick with WMC, because then that will be screwed, too. I do appreciate your post, though, thanks for it and your suggestion.

have movies as such: Movie Name (Year)/Movie Name (Year).avi and make sure you check that movies are in separate sub folders when setting the type of the source.
For series: TV Show Name/Season XX/ SXXEXX.episode name.avi

Setup FileBot to output in this format, import your files in bulk and let it do the heavy lifting ^^

I've tried to use Filebot but it's coming up with an error -

SAXParseException: The element type "Overview" mst be terminated by the matching end-tag "<Overview>".

I followed tomer953's post on how to rename all of your tv shows, where he said -

Not sure what I'm doing wrong here. It asks about a few tv shows when I start matching, and asks about weird ones such as "King" (I can only assume King of the Hill, but who knows?) and "Trip" (), so I have no idea where it's getting those. But I can't get past this error.

I also tried TV Renamer, and while it did detect everything in my TV Shows 2 folder, it detected nothing from my first TV Shows folder. For TV Shows, it says Folder per season. For TV Shows 2, it lists all of the shows and says they're either Folder per season of Flat. I don't know what that means or why it's not finding anything from the first folder.

I managed to get TV Renamer to run by adding the folder of every show from the TV Shows folder - tedious - and I edited each one it didn't automatically identify, so everything looked fine. I went through a scan of each one and it found everything that was there, and I saw an immediate improvement in XBMC when I started it up and added each folder for the first time (after a fresh install). Still, however, it's got missing episodes everywhere. It only recognises season 6 of Futurama despite my going through each one in TV Renamer, and it says Sharpe has no episodes at all.

I dunno. Both XBMC and Media Browser use the same scraper to get information for tv shows, why did one file format ("01 - Episode Title") work on one and not the other? Why does it need episodes to have their season number in the name when the season is already listed by the folder they're in? Why does it insist on refusing to acknowledge the existence of certain episodes? Why does Bello keep complaining about the mouse being plugged in whenever I start? Why does Weather's fan art not load backgrounds applicable to the current weather status instead of just being random? Why does it list some movies twice?

I'm going to continue to try and stick with XBMC, because WMC and Media Browser aren't supported any more and Media Browser Theatre is a useless buggy mess at this stage, but I am bewildered at how difficult it is to do seemingly simple things, like set up my library. If Media Browser couldn't find any information on a film or tv show, it still listed it as a playable item in the list - why can't XBMC? There are some things that it's just not going to see - my Web & Comedians folder, for example, is filled with neither movies nor tv shows, but is instead filled with all sorts of miscellaneous things that do not fit either description. XBMC has no chance of making any use out of this folder. I guess I have a lot to learn and I will continue to chug on through it, because I believe it's worth it in the end, but holy hell is it frustrating me along the way.